If you’re using Mozilla Firefox and haven’t updated yet to the latest version, you are missing a lot of new and important features.

Awesome new features in Firefox 69 release

To start with, Mozilla Firefox 69 enforces stronger security and privacy options by default. Here are some of the major highlights of the new release.

Firefox 69 blocks autoplay videos

A lot of websites offer auto-play videos nowadays. No matter whether it is a pop-up video or a video embedded in an article set to autoplay, it is blocked by default (or you may be prompted about it).

The Block Autoplay feature gives users to block any video playing automatically.

No more third party tracking cookies

By default, as part of the Enhanced Tracking Protection feature, it will now block third-party tracking cookies and crypto miners. This is a very useful change to enhance privacy protection while using Mozilla Firefox.

There are two kind of cookies: first party and third party. The first party cookies are owned by the website itself. These are the ‘good cookies’ that improve your browsing experience by keeping you logged in, remembering your password or entry fields etc. The third party cookies are owned by domains other than the website you visit. Ad servers use these cookies to track you and serve you tracking ads on all the website you visit. Firefox 69 aims to block these.

You will observe the shield icon in the address bar when it’s active. You may choose to disable it for specific websites.

Firefox Blocking Tracking

No more cryptomining off your CPU

The lust for cryptocurrency has plagued the world. The cost of GPU has gone high because the professional cryptominers use them for mining cryptocurrency.

That’s not it. If you visit some websites, they run scripts and use your computer’s CPU to mine cryptocurrency. This is called cryptojacking in IT terms.

The good thing is that Firefox 69 will automatically blocking cryptominers. So websites should not be able to exploit your system resources for cryptojacking.

Stronger Privacy with Firefox 69

If you take it up a notch with a stricter setting, it will block fingerprinters as well. So, you won’t have to worry about sharing your computer’s configuration info via fingerprinters when you choose the strict privacy setting in Firefox 69.

Performance Improvements

Even though Linux hasn’t been mentioned in the changelog – it mentions performance, UI, and battery life improvements for systems running on Windows 10/mac OS. If you observe any performance improvements, do mention it in comments.

Wrapping Up

In addition to all these, there’s a lot of under-the-hood improvements as well. You can check out the details in the release notes.

Firefox 69 is an impressive update for users concerned about their privacy. Similar to our recommendation on some of the secure email services recently, we recommend you to update your browser to get the best out of it. The new update is already available in most Linux distributions. You just have to update your system.

If you are interested in browsers that block ads and tracking cookies, try open source Brave browser. They are even giving you their own cryptocurrency for using their web browser. You can use it to reward your favorite publishers.

What do you think about this release? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

About Ankush Das

A passionate technophile who also happens to be a Computer Science graduate. He has had bylines at a variety of publications that include Ubergizmo & Tech Cocktail. You will usually see cats dancing to the beautiful tunes sung by him.

Yeah, that’s great news. But, unfortunately FF does not load userChrome.css/userContent.css anymore by default. Option toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets has to be set to “true” (about:config) in order for this to work.

Just a reminder Firefox banned gab and dissenter extensions, at the same time relies on the public opinion that they are a source of technological freedom and control. Not saying its a bad browser, only that if you believe in what makes Linux great is user-freedom, then Firefox is against your principles.